Despite everything that has happened over the past year, the Democrats only have a few percentage points lead over the Republicans in current midterm polling. As an outside observer: Absolutely wild. I know a lot about the reasons, but it still feels completely surreal.

Trump is not unique. You can find similar parties and figures in most of Europe. Usually the would-be autocrat populist is even more popular than in the US in two party systems. Multi party systems dilute it which just leads to paralysis until eventually >40% of your population is ok with abandoning democracy because the impacts of paralysis are stacking up (France).

There's a vox video about it: the firehose of falsehoods

It will explain a lot

Ps. Yes, insane

And just wait until all the stimulus Trump is going to drop on Americans before the midterms to make everything look good and gain back some voters.

The democrats have been an absolute failure of a party for the last decade and the fact their voters refuse to hold leadership accountable for those failures says everything you need to know.

There should have been a house-clearing of leadership up and down the party apparatus in 2016 and again in 2024 but nope. We'd rather hope those perpetual losers get their act together out of fear of the unknown.